Crazy Stable

Twas the week before Solstice, and all through the house...oh, never mind. This is precisely the week when my Christmas Fantasy of Homemade Gifts turns into my Christmas Panic of Reality...no, I have not sewn a million adorable sachets and catnip mice, or made a passle of delicately glitter-dusted star-book ornaments, or even baked a bunch of long-keeping spice cookies.

I have made one rocking calendar of Prospect Park, however, (that's February's shot, left), and there's still time to order some for those novelty-starved urbanites on your list! Or you could buy them "live" (no shipping cost!) tomorrow, Dec. 14, at the St. Boniface Christmas Fair, being held in the auditorium of St. Joseph High School in downtown Brooklyn, on Willoughby Street and Bridge Street from 9 a.m. to about 3 p.m. (a five-minute walk from the DeKalb Avenue station).  There will be other nifty vendors, including fair-trade exotic crafts, antiques, and the famous Oratorian Vegetarian Chili for a warming lunch.

And for more cool hand-made stuff, check out my Sickeningly Talented Pals, who are also showing and selling tomorrow (which should be declared Creative Gift-Shopping Sunday):

Karen Friedland has a home studio sale of her luminous paintings at 190 Marlborough Road (Q train, Beverly Road station). She has a new line of "magical minis" that sound intriguing (and affordable).

Rhea Kirstein, a watercolorist who is gaining a lot of admirers for her luscious and sensual canvases (like these fantastical fruits, below) is also welcoming collectors, in tandem with jewelry designer Sam Tomasello, who creates treasure-laden necklaces, pendants and more. Rhea and Sam's Park Slope home sale is from 1 to 6 p.m. at 464 Sixth Street, Apt. 2R.

Amid all the madness, remember that tomorrow is Gaudete Sunday—the joyous third Sunday in Advent (or, as I think of it in Advent-wreath terms, "Pink Candle Sunday"). Amid all the anxious waiting, it's a chance to whoop it up a little, liturgically and otherwise.

Dudes...Hallowe'en is, like, so over.

Maybe that's the message from Bagel the Squirrel (or perhaps his nephew Pepito). Instead of his usual carbohydrate offerings from the neighbors' trash (gnawed Jamaican meat patties are a current fave), we have this corpse from my compost heap. This poor little veggie has gone from Martha Stewart to Jack Skellington in the blink of a month, hasn't he?

I took it as a squirrelly reminder that we have no Christmas decorations up on the house yet. We don't do the whole Snoopy's Doghouse/Dyker Heights madness, but we do put up a pretty string of "drip" lights on the scruffy porch and, sometimes, electric candles in the windows (although I have to duct-tape them to our narrow sills, and then the cats blunder into them). I've been distracted with getting my Prospect Park calendar printed. It is now in hand and shipping; it's glossy and lovely and, on this dreary day, brings me back to the blissful hours I spent in the park this year. If you haven't done so, take a look; it would make a great gift (although Bagel and Pepito would rather have more old gourds, thanks). It will also help explain why we're so easily lured away and distracted from our renovation projects; we can always walk across the street and play in the park!

It's time for the annual CrazyStable wrap-up of the grooviest holiday shopping on the planet, right here in Brooklyn. In this time of economic downturn, you could head to some soul-crushing mall and buy marked-down practical crap...or you could feed the souls of you and those you love with absolutely original, delightful, artisanal delights from Brooklyn's niftiest neighborhoods. I know, tough choice, but that stuffy food court with the free samples of Teriyaki Chicken and the piped-in Muzak will always be there next year. Hit the brisk streets, (or the Internet in many cases if you can't get out) and check it out!

First, close to home, is my baby: the gorgeous 2009 calendar based on my other blog, Prospect: A Year in the Park. You can order with one-click PayPal at www.ayearainthepark.com. It's a 12-month, full-color, bookstore-quality calendar of my best photos of Prospect Park's stunning art, architecture, woods, meadows, and lake. And because I wanted, not some old template, but the design I saw in my head--open, airy, studded with dazzling little details--I learned Adobe InDesign and designed it myself. The park has been a huge gift to my life this year, (I call it "the mystical green heart of Brooklyn" and also my Urban Narnia), and this is my way of making it a gift you can give to yourself and others. Want to save shipping and get your calendar signed by ze artist? Come to the St. Boniface crafts fair next Sunday afternoon, Dec. 14th, at St. Joseph's High School, 382 Bridge Street (on Willoughby). And no, I have not gone totally digital: For my hand-made book art, check out www.tenthleper.us for inspiring pochoir accordion books in slipcases, pocket-sized treasures of Walt Whitman verse, and a solstice message from one of the Twentieth Century's most interesting women.

My Bloody Brilliant Brooklyn Buddies

Art from living artists: the coolest gift in the universe. Let's start with painter Karen Friedland, whose collectors wait all year for her home studio sale each December (perhaps because she is prone to absurdly gentle pricing around the holidays). Her vibrant work could turn a DMV waiting room into a joyous dreamscape. She renders armchairs, cafes and foreign cityscapes into wild visions of color, but I am partial to her tenderly evocative elephants (shown). Karen's sale is at 190 Marlborough Road (Q train, Beverly Road station), next weekend, Dec. 13 and 14th, between 1-5 p.m.

More brilliance: Awesome paintings and hand-painted silk scarves from artist/illustrator Betsy Day. Treasure-loaded jewelry designs from Sam Tomasello. Books and prints of enchantment from Kris Waldherr (another fellow Flatbusher). Environmental mixed-media things of beauty from Kathy Levine (who's having a home studio sale of her own--yes, in Flatbush, the Next Arts Hot Spot--this weekend and next).

Holiday Fair Madness

Finally, there are absurd numbers of great craft and art fairs happening this weekend and next, and we are not talking orange-acrylic-knitted toilet-paper covers here, folks. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Sunday, Dec. 7:  Starting close to home, Holy Name School (attended by Daughter) is having a Holiday Fair  from 12 til 4 p.m.; they're at the intersection of Prospect Avenue and Prospect Park West in Windsor Terrace, go through the parking lot to the hall underneath the church.

For major hipness, check out the Third Ward Handmade Holiday Craft Fair in Bushwick (hey, Williamsburg is, like, so over, man!) Dec. 7 from 12 to 7 p.m. They promise "vintage wares, and everything else from jewelry to LED Hula hoops to dog costumes" (hey, I need, like, all of those!), plus a D.J. called "Sigmund Droid." It's at 195 Morgan Avenue; go here for more info.

Don't laugh: Give Gowanus for the holidays! No, not the canal water, although that would be edgy. Some of the best artists (discovered and un-) in Brooklyn are showing and selling each weekend from now through Dec. 22. (Shown: Eddie E. Cato's"Gowanus El" from 1972.) The Gowanus Conservancy's art show and sale features more than 125 oils, watercolors, photos and other media, with many smaller works priced for actual buying. The works reflect the haunting spare beauty of the surrounding post-industrial landscape (big sky, hulking bridges, brownstones, cobblestones) and beyond, and I love it.

Now go out there and shop;  for the sake of our great nation's economy it is your civic duty to spend lavishly!

That was the message from the rabbi at the funeral of my fellow Brooklynites Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, slain at the Chabad House in Mumbai, where they extended the familiar intense welcome of the Lubavitch Hasidic community (familiar to anyone who's ever encountered their street emissaries here) to Jews and others in that exotic port now scarred by terrorism. They extended that "threat" to those who orphaned the Holtzbergs' two surviving children and killed a third, still unborn. This family, who accepted every one of their children as a precious gift from God, (including, apparently, two youngsters before toddler Moishe who inherited the devastating disorder Tay-Sachs), has become, in their destruction by blind hatred, a rallying point for love--for what my Roman Catholic tradition calls heroic virtue.

I needed to hear that, because this holy day season, I find myself short on the spirit of the stable at Bethlehem. I am feeling more like Clint Eastwood in his "Ask yourself, do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?" phase. I want to blow up the people who blow people up. I want to trample the wide-screen-TV-lusting morons who trample a hard-working Haitian temp trying to make a minimum-wage buck in the pre-dawn hours at a Long Island Wal-Mart. I want to see the heads of the U.S. automakers work at Wal-Mart...on Black Friday...because they cranked out Hummers when what we needed was Mini Coopers and bicycle lanes. I want CitiBank to give us a bailout, not the other way around, because we ran up our debt being elder caregivers, not weasels and high-stakes gamblers.

I guess it's a pretty obvious irony that the spirit of the original CrazyStable should return to me via the Jews (and not just any Jews, but this manic and fractious sect, with their messianic subsect who await the imminent return of dear old Rabbi Schneerson). At home here in Brooklyn, how are our Catholic bishops responding to the dark swirling news in this alleged season of light? Well, they're pondering how to shut down a good chunk of our Catholic parochial schools with as little negative P.R. as possible, a forward-looking project with the Orwellian name "Preserving the Vision." (Or is it "Visioning the Preserve?" Oh well, same deal: Say goodbye to the Bells of St. Mary's and hello to some new lease opportunities for the public schools, once they knock down the crosses from the roofs.) Theologically, I short-circuit when I want to blow up bishops--apostolic succession and all that--making my frustration even greater.

And so I turn to our zealous Jewish brothers and sisters to remind me what the Christmas season is really all about. Here, from the inspiring supersite Chabad.org, is a description of what it was like to stay with Gavriel and Rivky in Mumbai:

On my second Shabbat at Chabad, Rivky told me there were two Israeli men staying at the house who were just released from an Indian prison. When I saw these men sitting at the dinner table, I was startled. One man had only a front tooth and a raggedy pony tail, and the other looked like an Israeli version of Rambo. I observed the way that Gabi interacted with them and how they were welcomed at the Shabbat table the same way everyone else was, and my fears melted away. Over the course of the night, I learned that these men were not the only prisoners or ex-convicts the Holtzberg's helped. Gabi frequently brought Kosher meals to Israelis in prison, spent time with them, listened to their life stories, and took them in after their release.

The Holtzbergs, said this witness, "took their jobs as shlichim (emissaries) very seriously. Their lives never stopped. There was no such thing as 'personal space' or 'down time'. The phones rang constantly, people came in and out like a subway station, and all the while Rivky and Gabi were calm, smiling, warm, and welcomed everyone like family."

On Chabad.org, you can immediately contribute to the "revenge" of light and good deeds by making a cyberpledge of a mitzvah. I clicked "lighting Sabbath candles," because we started lighting our Advent wreath this week. I don't think Gavriel and Rivky would be too "orthodox" to reject that entry, do you?  My thanks to the Lubavitchers for reminding me of a path beyond my Clint Eastwood fantasies. Maybe when you believe the Messiah has already come two millenia ago, you get complacent.

Image, top: Chabad.org

Yes, I've got ancestors of my own. Boxes and boxes of them, actually, in great unsorted masses of photos dating from tintypes to Polaroids to JPEGs. Why, then, can I not resist buying other people's orphaned ancestors in stoop-sale troves of ephemera?

Well, with these folks, it was obvious. Where else, for one dollar, could you find such a picture of family likeness and contentment? They're not quite the seaside-fun types, it is true, but they're game for some nautical breezes--and they're together. And what a heart-melting bunch they are: Dad with his Teddy Roosevelt vibe, Mom and those two sweet, open-faced sisters ("Don't worry, dear, no one thought I'd ever find a beau either, and then along came your father!"), and then the slightly raffish brother (or could he, perhaps, be Hermione's treasured beau, along for the outing?)

I tried to resist them, but the deal was closed when I turned the photo over. No identification to solve the mystery of their identity, but there was this:

Funny? Yes, but maybe true at a deeper level. What makes an "unusually good group picture" of our families? No one is glowering; no one has teeth gritted in forbearance; no one, we hope, is missing. There are no clouds on the horizon, and the day stretches ahead for them to enjoy.

How this gem wound up in a shoebox on President Street in Park Slope, with dozens of other anonymous snapshots sifted down from six decades, I have no idea. Whoever they were, I hope they had many more happy years and good times. It is fun to launch them onto the Internet, like a message in a bottle.